July 7, 2012 -- Arum berries, fennel, and redbud "feathers"

In this little brown vase (and lying in front of the vase) are stout stalks of reddish-orange Arum berries.  They are always such a surprise, coming up as they do after the spear-shaped leaves have disappeared.  Here I've combined them with a spray of fennel flowers and some of the "feathers" I made using redbud pods and knotweed stems on July 3.

July 6, 2012 -- snack food

Someone, who shall remain nameless, had some snack food before going to bed last night and left the box out on the counter.

Here's the result.



July 5, 2012 -- yesterday's arrangements, recycled

These are yesterday's table arrangements without the flags. I took the photo using the flash, which results in sort of strange lighting, but it helps you to see the way the tomatoes sit on the lips of these vases, which I like. "Ingredients" = Queen Anne's lace, garlic scapes and flowers, fennel (some of which held up), basil, gloriosa daisies, and tomatoes.

July 4, 2012 -- flowers for the fourth

These will be table decorations later today. There's a tomato sitting on the lip of one vase and the other vase is filled with tomatoes (but they're not sitting in water; there's a tube nestled among the tomatoes to hold water for the flowers). There's basil, Queen Anne's lace, a gloriosa daisy, and some fennel in each vase, but I've discovered the fennel wants to wilt even though I cut it early this morning when it was way cooler than it is now.

Oh, and the wacky outlier flower in each vase (a bomb bursting in air!) is a garlic flower.  In the photo, this second vase looks more off kilter that it really is.

July 3, 2012 -- another riff on loosestrife

After I snipped all the side shoots off Sunday's tall stem of yellow loosestrife (see July 1) and dropped them into these little vases, I left the tube that had held the original stem on the counter to clean it and in it were some of the knotweed stems I'd used to support the tall stem in the tube. A neighbor dropped by and admired the knotweed stems (go figure), which sort of moved them up in my estimation, and I decided to drop three of them into these vases.  They looked too stiff for these fluffy little concoctions, though, so I started looking for something to stuff into their tops (knotweed stems are hollow). First thing I saw was redbud seed pods, which worked perfectly. They actually look like green feathers, poised as they are in the tops of the knotweed stems.

I love having this photo, because it will serve as a record of when redbud pods are this size and color.

P.S. The tomatoes were the last thing I added to the windowsill, and I added them just because I had them, they had pretty little stem leaves, and they were red!

July 2, 2012 -- yellow loosestrife, harvested indoors!

The fun thing about this is that I harvested all these little yellow loosestrife stems from the one tall stem I used in yesterday's windowsill arrangement!  The process was really satisfying because, although I gardened this morning when it was relatively cool, I didn't feel gathering flowers outside on this hot afternoon.

July 1, 2012 -- yesterday's tomatoes and yellow loosestrife

The way this combination came about is fun. I cut this nice, long stalk of yellow-flowering loosestrife early this morning just because it was leaning way over across the lawn and would have been ravaged by the lawn mower. Put it in a vase to hold it while I went on about the day and it wilted not a bit (which is surprising, because it was originally even taller than it is now and the day is a scorcher). This afternoon, I decided to combine it with the tomatoes I'd put in a glass vase yesterday. But how? I don't really like seeing fruit and veggies submerged in water, so I nested a nice, big, glass tube in among the tomatoes, filled it with water, and that's what the loosestrife is standing in.

P. S. Power's back on, so life is easy.